Black Girls Code Relaunches with expanded program, funding campaign

Black Girls CODE (BGC), a Bay Area startup that aims to redress the on-going lack of paticipation of minority women in tech careers, took to the New Parkway theater in Oakland to re-launch its educational program with a new Summer Camp in Oakland, a 10 city Summer of Code tour, and an Indie-GoGo cloud funding effort. The unique program for minority girls inspired filmmakers Shanice Johnson and Janet Robinson to create a documentary which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival last month.
The standing-room-only Parkway event brought together 150 entrepenuers, educators, parent volunteers, their daughters and potentially supportive Oaklanders who contributed thousands to the BGC program. This week, their campaign is at the $15,000 milestone, with only about 25 days left to reach their $100,000 goal to expand their program of technical education to another 2,000 girls of color. Some 140 supporters have contributed to the Indie-GoGo campaign so far.

The Parkway event was MC’d by Kalimah Priforce, a 2013 Black Male Achievement Fellow who co-founded Qeyno Labs and also works with the Hidden Genius Project, a program similar to Black Girls Code aimed at Afican American boys. He is one of this year’s Black Male Achievement Fellows, a program that runs 18 months and carries a $70,000 stipend. “I remember when Kimberly first approached me with Black Girls Code and she shared her vison and its has been pretty amazing what has manifested from that vision,” Priforce told the Parkway audience. In the last 2 years, the BGC program has introduced close to 1,500 girls to programming via web site construction, game-building competitions, robotics, and visits to the tech campuses of Facebook, Google, and other major tech companies. The target of BGC efforts are girls of color (their definition encompasses African Americans, Latinas, and Native Americans) since this demographic has less than a 3% representation in technology fields. They focus on girls between 7 and 17, encouraging their natural curiosity before ‘Geekness’ becomes a negative socially.

BGCode and Bryant have won many awards, including a Google RISE Award and a place in the Top 10 Black Innovators of 2012 by Blacks in Technology (BiT).

BGC’s dynamic founder, Kimberly Bryant, has had a long career as an Electrical Engineer and Biotech professional. But Math and Computer Science have been her life-long loves. She founded Black Girls Code in 2011 after seeing so few women of color at Silicon Valley events.

Bryant explained her long-term goals to Oakland Local: “We are slowly but surely changing and shaping the image of the computer science professional to include women and girls of color and driving the narrative around the importance of women and girls as creators in technology. The work we are doing is vitally important both to the students we serve and to the industry as a whole. By continuing to expand and build our programs, and with continued community support, we will, indeed, change the face of technology.”